Now, footage of the internment of Japanese Americans in camps in the Western United States is as hard to fathom as scraps of film footage can be to make out through the injuries of time.
The Japanese American National Museum is dedicated to preserving such memories, and others from the long residence in North America of people of Japanese descent. Located in Los Angeles, it has posted more than 300 rare home-movie clips as one section of its Discover Nikkei web site. Intended for educational, nonprofit uses, the Discover Nikkei trove reflects the varied lives of Japanese immigrant families, from the 1920s to the 1960s. Among the clips are 100 minutes of footage from the internment camps. The films, most in black and white, some in color, document Japanese Americans living in forced exclusion. They display everyday life of families and individuals – fishing, farming, worshiping, marrying, being buried…
As for the internment footage, it was taken during World War II at camps at Heart Mountain, Wyoming; Topaz, Utah; and Tule Lake, California. Among the items is 30 minutes of footage made in secret at the Topaz camp, and that was added to the National Film Registry in 1996.
The clips have been grouped into various collections, such as the Lloyd Evans Collection. The items include this five-minute segment depicting activities at Heart Mountain, and was filmed by Reverend Stanley T. Evans, who visited Rev. Donald Toriumi at the camp in 1945. The clip shows the camp’s Community Christian Church after Sunday services; parishioners including some in U.S. military uniform, outside the church; and a distant view of snow-covered Heart Mountain.
Credit: Lloyd Evans Collection, Gift of Reverend Stanley T. Evans, Japanese American National Museum. Preserved and made accessible in part by a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
What did the busy doctor of 1949 do to catch a moment’s pause on his busy rounds?
[Please note: This scenario refers to a now-mythic era in American life when doctors actually left their offices and went to where the sick lay ailin’.]
Why, of course, they smoked, as several items in a collection of smoking ads kept by the Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising project attest.
The project makes public many examples of print and moving-image ads from throughout the long, duplicitous history of cigarette smoking. Also collected by the project, which is based at the Stanford School of Medicine, are examples of social media related to smoking.
The exhibition, “Not a Cough in a Carload: Images from the Campaign by the Tobacco Industry to Hide the Hazards of Smoking,” was displayed at Stanford University in 2007 and then at several other institutions in the United States and Brazil.
Participants in the interdisciplinary SRITA project – scholars and students of various branches of medicine as well as history and anthropology – analyze the effects of tobacco advertising, marketing, and promotion, over the decades, the current one, included.
The items offer diverting opportunities to parse out the carefully phrased rhetoric of Big Tobacco. Can you spot the bald-faced deceptions, in this doozy?
“Time out for many men of medicine usually means just long enough to enjoy a cigarette. And because they know what a pleasure it is to smoke a mild, good-tasting cigarette. They’re particular about the brand they choose.”
“In a repeated national survey, doctors in all branches of medicine, doctors in all parts of the country, were asked…
…‘What cigarette do you smoke, Doctor?’”
“Once again the brand named most was Camel. Yes, according to this repeated nationwide survey, more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.”
“Why not change to Camels for the next 30 days…
and see what a difference it makes in your smoking enjoyment?”
“See how camels agree with your throat. See how mild and good-tasting a cigarette can be.”
Oh, and how many should you puff? This informative Chesterfield ad suggests an appropriate dosage:
“A group of people smoked only Chesterfields for six month, in their normal amounts – 10 to 40 a day…”
What did Key West look like in the 1950s, before much of it was contorted into a garish tourist trap?
Carib Gold, a 1956 drama, gives some indication. It is a rare document of its time in another respect, too: its cast was largely African American.
With great underwater shots and plenty of local flavor, it tells of a group of Florida shrimpers who meet misadventure while recovering a sunken treasure. It was shot in and around Key West, with local citizens appearing alongside stars Ethel Waters, Coley Wallace, Cicely Tyson, and Geoffrey Holder.
The G. William Jones Film and Video Collection at the Hamon Arts Library at Southern Methodist University has just added Carib’s Gold to its online collection, and is adding other titles from the Texas Black Film Collection during 2012.
SMU also is the home of the African American Film Materials digital collection of photographs and pressbooks from films featuring African American actors. It includes over 4,000 film stills, lobby books, pressbooks, posters, and related items from motion pictures spanning nearly 40 years.
Beginning in 2010, SMU preserved and digitized its print of Carib’s Gold with a grant from the San Francisco-based National Film Preservation Foundation, which is the nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America’s film heritage.
The University of California at Los Angeles Library has announced a gift from the Arcadia Fund of $3.4-million to help it to preserve “ephemeral media” including a wide range of media artifacts that are serving to capture the rapidly evolving political changes in the Middle East.
The new International Digitizing Ephemera Project’s goal is to gather, digitally preserve, and make publicly accessible the kinds of media products that increasingly serve to note historically important occurrences – print items, images, multimedia, and social networking items such as Facebook posts, Twitter feeds, smart phone photos, and other informal ephemeral media.
During the five-year project, UCLA librarians will collect resources produced in the Middle East, organize them, and make them available as primary sources for students and scholars. UCLA will collaborate with three international partners including the National Library of Israel (NLI) and two others yet to be chosen.
UCLA librarians say they will offer the project as a model for collaborative international preservation and access activities. The UCLA Library hopes to expand it to eastern Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands and Central America, where researchers rely on ephemeral primary sources because traditional documentation of events and communities is lacking.
The Arcadia Fund, which has made several major grants to the UCLA library system, is a British foundation dedicated to preservation of cultural knowledge and materials, and to environmental conservation. Its causes include preserving near-extinct languages, rare historical archives, museum-quality artifacts, and protecting threatened ecosystems and environments.
Now, footage of the internment of Japanese Americans in camps in the Western United States is as hard to fathom as scraps of film footage can be to make out through the injuries of time.
What did the busy doctor of 1949 do to catch a moment’s pause on his busy rounds?
The University of California at Los Angeles Library has announced a gift from the Arcadia Fund of $3.4-million to help it to preserve “ephemeral media” including a wide range of media artifacts that are serving to capture the rapidly evolving political changes in the Middle East.